


Toxic

by hayden



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 02:17:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6034303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hayden/pseuds/hayden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are never alone in death. Your family's-- or your own. Someone, or something, is here to prove that to the most unlikely of subjects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toxic

**Author's Note:**

> Rating for later chapters. A slow work in progress with (for now) short chapters, and unhealthy and even inappropriate relationships. Prepare for the worst.

It was raining. Umber bangs and a feverish forehead had pressed tightly to the warping glass of the settling Victorian house, now groaning as old houses tended to do at night, and the boy distinctly felt the drumming of every drop that hit. It was a drum of uneven beats; a cacophony to match the irate noises of a million perturbed thoughts that he would have given anything to have drowned in white noise. Colour had filled his moony flesh with spots of nearly apoplectic red and he was tired, oh so very tired, but the itching and the burning had not stopped and he was near to bursting with the sensations that littered his small body. Small, distant steps no longer sounded on the floor outside of his bedroom and he supposed that the pacing was done for- no small miracle given his young aunt’s frantic character. 

Likely, she had been pulled away, by her husband perhaps, and the boy at the window was truly grateful because he had quite enough sound in his life; the rain at the window, gently smacking against his head through reverberation on the glass that cooled his burning eyes, the pittering of trim nails from an overly anxious dog that his father had not once but twice failed to drown before finally allowing his son to keep it, the hushed sobs and consoling whispers of those who thought, _the boy is too young to understand what he has lost, and the boy is ill and it would be a shame if he were lost to them as well._

That boy, that sick boy cradling a delicate china doll to his spotty breast was not too young to understand his loss or comprehend what he had seen. Death was not an entirely new concept to him. There was something about him that attracted it, flirted with it, brought him near to the grave before knocking him back and choosing another. At first it was his grandmother, frail and still so beautiful, her chair no longer rocking at his back as he scooted his wooden trains above her polished floors. Then it was his father, an explosion at the mine, and the smell of soot on everything that had once smelled like him and now only reminded the boy of bitter resentment, and the lashing out of a mother whose coping methods for being a widow boiled down to beating her son when he asked when daddy was coming home. 

Fever had set in, and mother swung in her room, the point of her shoes gently scratching above the wooden slats. He could hear it in his head behind his million thoughts, a maddening lullaby of dragging leather on wood, his mother’s swollen tongue clear in his mind as much as the smell of her vacated bladder. Ammonia was as clear as day in the air for the boy at the window as the pattering of rain-drops, falling in time to the sound of a life falling apart before an age of majority could be reached. Burning eyes closed, tears like rain hitting the floor to the rhythm of the storm and drawing a solitary heir to sleep. 

Memories of dreams were wisps on the mind not unlike cobwebs, faint little things that left as much of an impression as the tickling of ghostly fingers skirting through the short hairs of the nape. The boy remembered very little of what he dreamed, but it was the impression of how his dream had made him feel that sat with him most through the next day. The sole image repeating at the back of his mind was this: a vision of ice, and strong arms lifting him from his seat at the window to carry him to bed. Then the whisper of words promising that he was no longer alone. Waking had looked to be the opposite of this hushed promise, but even someone as small as the boy was had the instinct to sense when he was being looked after. It had nothing at all to do with his aunt, married so recently into the family and widowed almost as quickly, who felt that it was her unspoken duty to play the role of mother in place of his own. 

He wondered, if it was a bit morbid, if she had been the one to cut his mother down and loose the rope from her neck. The image of her flesh swollen and angry-red around it surfaced unbidden to mind and he did not cry, which was the smallest mercy he had been granted yet. There was an abundance of sadness, of that there could be no doubt, but in the day after the discovery of his mother’s body the boy felt swallowed by grief - and could not spare the energy it took to let it drown him the way it ought. He returned to his station at his window that following night, and pushed his feelings away until there was nothing but the hollow whisper of his dream; _you are not alone. I am with you always._


End file.
